Fantastic Resumes and How to Make Them!

The following blog post was written after attending the iJOBS Workshop: Transferable Skills and Experience as a Professional Profile: Resume and Cover Letters on January 23rd, 2018. What exactly is a transferable skill? How does my resume show I am a qualified candidate for this position? These were questions I was hoping to get the answer to when I attended the iJOBS Seminar: Transferable Skills and Experience as a Professional Profile: Resume and Cover presented by Dr. Fatima Williams. Dr. Williams has worked as a career advisor at the counseling office for the University of Pennsylvania and now runs the consulting firm Beyond the Tenure Track, which advises college graduate students and post-docs on career advancement. Read Blogger Urmimala Basu’s review of the service here. She has also published a book on searching for a career titled:   . Dr. Williams described a resume as a “Navigate your way through the subtilties of the resume by following her instructions and recommendations:  Analyzing the job description When building your resume for any position you want to be sure that you communicate that you can complete the key tasks. Dr. Williams taught us how to use the job description to find the key skills a job requires. Then address each of those job requirements with key skills and show that you have them. The key is to think broadly about your experiences and the takeaway message that you want to instill in the reader. When telling a story about how your experiences addresses a major job requirement, use the following outline: Context ⇒ Skill ⇒ Outcome. Or if you addressed a problem, use Challenge ⇒ Action ⇒ Result. For example: Context: Research lab was spending $10,000 on a mouse colony that no member of the lab was actively using. Skill: Used litter data to identify the optimal number of cages needed to maintain the mouse colony. Outcome: Reduced unnecessary mouse colony expenditures by 78% This experience outline, in sequential bullet point summaries, will allow your reader to get an idea of who you are while illustrating your job qualifications.   A few additional tips!

1. Publications are results, but so are collaborations! Don’t be afraid to count collaborations as results on their own.
2. A big challenge in resume building is how to take lengthy and impressive CVs and edit them down. It’s best to prioritize the information relevant to the position you are applying for.
3. You should only list one email address at the top, more than one is excessive.
4. Get a sense of the company audience for the position you are applying for by using the company’s social media pages. Ask yourself, what does this organization value?
5. Create a narrative with your resume. A summary line or two under the header will allow the reader to have a roadmap of how to read the rest of the document.
6. When listing technical skills, do not list the courses you have taken but, rather, the projects you have completed.
7. Under your experience header, you should add your technical skills. Use this section to give concrete examples and quantity of completed projects. For example, if you completed 6 projects write the number as a number (6) and not written out (six), this allows the reader to access your major points quickly.
8. Situation Task Action Result is a method that is very helpful for concisely conveying messages. Use it to tell stories about your accomplishments.
9. You can include links, but keep in mind that no one is going to your links.
10. If they don’t ask for references in the first round, do not include them.
11. Make sure your resume is visually appealing by not squeezing everything in with a half a point margin.
12. Use fonts other than Times New Roman…Everyone uses Times New Roman. Try Arial or Calibri for visual diversity!

Key Differences between academic and resume writing At one point during the seminar, several participants reviewed a resume description of grading student work. The participant commented that they felt that the description was embellishing a mundane task that was not difficult and describing grading in this way made them feel uncomfortable. Another participant agreed with that the description made them feel uncomfortable, they thought that description should be more concise and to the point. Dr. Williams discussed how, in these cases, there are different languages used. In academia, you want to be as clear and to the point as possible. When applying for a job, you want descriptive language to serve as a guide for the resume reviewer to follow along. This type of descriptive language is easy for the reviewer to understand and makes them feel comfortable. Dr. Janet Alder (iJOBS executive director), also pointed out that language changes in the business world in comparison to academia. Dr. Williams also mentioned that many PhD applicants are too modest with their accomplishments and have a hard time embellishing them enough to be consistent with the language of business. She encouraged us to write stories in our resumes by asking “Is it true? If I don’t tell the story, who else will?”. To help you write your story, focus on your results and outcome. Here are some useful ways to think of outcomes:

1. Time Spent
2. Money Saved and/or Earned
3. Number of people recruited
4. Number of papers published that was a result of your research
5. Can the reader picture the scene?
6. Have I included action verbs?
7. Is everything quantified where possible?

This seminar went beyond my expectations by supplementing familiar major points and introducing me to many new techniques and suggesting a system to generating well-written resumes. Writing and presenting your skills is very similar to other types of science writing; you must always keep the audience in mind. When giving a presentation, you have to think about what the audience is going to take from your presentation. Likewise, with a resume, you want to directly address the prompt presented to you in the job description. Remember to sell yourself through your writing, tell your personal story in a fun and interesting way, and show that you have the skills to succeed at the position you are applying for! Edits and suggestions that contributed to the development of this post were made by fellow bloggers, Eileen Oni, Jennifer Casiano, and Maryam Alapa.